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by einr 932 days ago
TV boxes IME usually ship with less compute than they have to [in order to provide reasonable UX] ;)
4 comments

Anything to satisfy whichever law it is that says "lagginess remains constant".
"Huh, this CPU is kind of snappy running native code now. What should we do?"

"Let's move application development to Python then, I suppose."

"Thanks, that fixed it."

Probably what happened in my 55" smart TV dev team.

I would bet that instead of python it's JavaScript and a webapp pretending to be a native application.
If it's an LG TV this is literally true. They bought webOS specifically for this purpose. Meanwhile Roku invented a runtime/language (BrightScript) and mandated its use to at least enforce a minimum quality standard and throw away cruft.
WebOS supports Qt as well.
Definitely happened on the OLPC.

What's worse, they made a "throbber" effect by string substituting a different color into an SVG, and then reparsing the SVG, for each color it fades through.

That's the kind of coding quality the OLPC project had. That's why it failed, and it probably also factored into why they disabled the view source button.

In modern GTK you also have to string-substitute or otherwise construct CSS, pass in as a string and have it reparsed to change element styles. But at least it is native!
It also failed because it took ages to release anything useful. It took years, and suddenly smartphones were upon us all, and OLPC shrunk from a special niche to a tiny niche.
And kiosks, like the McDonald's ordering kiosks. I wouldn't be surprised if they spend more on installation than on building the device itself!
I haven't interacted with these much, but in all such things, eg TVs, others, I get peeved at the thought process.

Typical dev time for a new UI from scratch is years. And price drop on parts and their availability will be different down the road.

I wonder of people are running all tests, DEV work in KVM or other emulation stacks for DEV, but then not accurately locking clock rate, and limiting RAM during testing.

Because I'd quit as a DEV, if I saw the fruits of my labours, turning out as complete crap and a laughing stock. I wouldn't want my name associated with laggy, crashy, frustrating junk. I'd want no part of it, no part of everyone hating my work.

And further, how the hell does laggy crap get past the CTO? CEO? I've seen lag just trying to change the channel!

I mean, outside of caring about customers every buying anything with your name again, there's the laughing stock factor.

"Hi, I'm CEO of crappy corp"

"Wow, you must be really proud of yourself, dumbass"

I just don't get it. CEO bonuses aside, saving 10 cents on a part, over 10M units is still only $1M extra profit, and the CEO might see a tiny fraction, as a bonus, of that extra profit.

I don't grok.

> I mean, outside of caring about customers every buying anything with your name again, there's the laughing stock factor.

The problem is, there is no competition, everyone sucks and only builds to "it works somewhat" quality. Hence, no incentive for anyone to invest more money.

Most developers suck.
Even if it were true that is not the problem. Even sucky devs can crank out code that runs reasonably fast. It just depends on whether the company sees it as a required feature.
Making your code run quickly will not help if your software architecture is inefficient or optimized against the customer as so many web applications are these days, for example. There are many commercial web pages that appear and approximately ten seconds later clicking on a button will actually do something. I am not sure why that it considered acceptable, but customer experience doesn't seem to rank very high on the list of priorities.
In some cases, it's because the devs are developing locally and never intentionally test with their browser set to simulate latency.
Part of making code run quickly is architecting the solution correctly.
My personal peeve is the original Coke Freestyle machines which are overtaxed WinCE systems meant to run with a lower resolution PDA display. They've never resolved all the gross latency issues with them and even the new Freestyle machines are laggy compared to the older Pepsi spire dispensers which could generate fluid full motion video years earlier.
God, yes. Every time I use one of these forsaken machines I can't help but wonder during the long latency pauses "did anyone use this before they shipped it?"
No, they're just bad at software.
Eh, the result may suck, but I don't think it's usually a hardware problem.